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Startups Leveraging Akamai CDN Services

Companies large and small trust Akamai to deliver fast, reliable and secure online experiences and scale with them as their business grows.

Discover companies like yours who are changing the game online with Akamai

Some of the largest companies across industries choose Akamai for unparalleled online superiority. But Akamai isn’t just for the giants. Any startup company can leverage Akamai the same way any of its large customers do. The Akamai Intelligent Platform™ is designed to meet the needs and challenges of businesses of all sizes.

"Akamai is helping AfterBuzz TV build and deliver an innovative programming model that otherwise wouldn't be feasible by giving us the ability to efficiently reach connected audiences with live, high-quality content. Our aftershows attract passionate, highly engaged 'superfans' that want to extend the experience of their favorite shows and talk about the episodes beyond the regular viewing window. The Akamai platform enables us to grow the communities around our programs by allowing viewers to watch and engage on nearly any connected device they choose." - Maria Menounos, co-founder, AfterBuzz TV

AfterBuzz TV, a producer of live and recorded "aftershow" webcast and podcast content for TV series of all kinds, is using Akamai Media Delivery Solutions to reach a broader multi-screen audience. Coinciding with the launch of its new AfterBuzzTV.com website, the network is now leveraging Akamai to deliver all of its live online video programming to iOS and Android smartphones and tablets as well as personal computers. Learn more.

"Our customers are located in 192 different countries, and Akamai allows us to deliver a fast experience wherever they might be. Akamai has been a very important partner for us to scale airbnb" - Nathan Blecharczyk, CTO and Co-founder, Airbnb.

Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world – online or from a mobile phone. Highlighted in publications from the Wall Street Journal to the BBC and the New York Times, even the Conan O’Brien show, Airbnb allows travelers to take advantage of the availability of space in homes, apartments, villas – even tree-houses – and create their own unique travel experience. Whether it’s tree-houses in Japan, castles in Ireland or apartments in Greenwich village, Akamai helps Airbnb’s global marketplace flourish by allowing them to deliver an unrivaled user experience anytime, anywhere, on any device. Learn more.

"The fact that Akamai provides DDoS protection without negatively impacting site or application performance is key. Our site and application need to be fast and always available, and Akamai enables that." - Andrew Blackmore, CTO, AvidMobile

Since its founding in 2007, AvidMobile has established itself as one of the fastest growing mobile marketing companies in North America. The company offers many out-of-the-box solutions, including the ability to develop and deploy mobile marketing campaigns on the fly, develop mobile websites and landing pages, and produce campaigns in minutes inside a web-based user-interface. To date, approximately 800 companies use the application to capture mobile subscribers.

After implementing the Akamai Kona Site Defender solution, AvidMobile’s site, application, and entire data center became protected against DDoS attacks. In addition to ensuring protection without slowing down site or application performance, the solutions delivered peace of mind for the company’s IT and support teams. Learn more.

"As former customers of Akamai at our previous successful gaming companies, we knew that with Akamai we get the certainty of service we need. We know it works, does not present bottlenecks, and ensures reliability that is critical to a startup." - Howard Marks, Founder & CEO of Gamzee.

Gamzee is a social gaming company building games that 'play everywhere'. Comprised of a team of successful gaming industry veterans, Gamzee is tapping into the growing multi-platform universe and social media to build games that will play on tablets desktops and mobile devices with multiplatform feel and usability. Key to Gamzee's success is its ability to deliver a consistent experience regardless of the access network and device platform. The other critical requirement for success is that, as the Gamzee user base grows, its art and animation do not get bogged down.

"Mobile usage is increasing dramatically and mobile customers are displaying an unprecedented level of engagement when using applications. Having a mobile app or website is critical for retailers and brands to ensure they are not missing this valuable opportunity to connect with their consumers and to engage with them across the multiple paths to purchase. Leveraging Akamai’s Aqua Web Solutions, GPShopper has been able to increase the performance of our mobile solutions and provide a better mobile shopping experience for all of our customers." - Alex Muller, CEO, GPShopper

GPShopper develops award-winning mobile solutions for major retailers and brands to drive mobile commerce, increase in-store engagement and promote brand loyalty. The company’s apps, mobile websites and in-store beacon solutions are powered by an enterprise-class, mobile platform which includes a complete suite of mobile content management and reporting tools. As GPShopper’s client base and service offerings continue to grow and evolve rapidly, the company was looking for a business partner that could help speed the delivery of content and services optimized for mobile technology. By leveraging Akamai’s solutions, GPShopper can provide its retail customers with faster response times, better reporting and increased ease of implementation. Learn more.

"Akamai has supported us through our amazing growth surge, enabling us to continue delivering a great member experience every day." - Kevin Diamond, Chief Technology Officer, HauteLook

HauteLook, a premier members-only site, offers private, limited-time sale events on the world's top brands for women's and men's fashion, accessories, beauty, kids, home and travel. Each day, HauteLook offers discounts of 50-75% to millions of members in the U.S. and Canada. In the last three years, over 1,400 high profile brands have chosen HauteLook to host more than 3,500 private events on the site chosen by People Magazine "one of the top 15 ways to save money." With no bricks-and-mortar presence, HauteLook empowers consumers in the U.S. and Canada to shop simultaneously in a unique sample-sale format. Learn more.

"We've built a highly sophisticated trading and order execution platform that can be used globally, so it is extremely important that our system is accessible around the clock. Akamai helps us ensure that we have powerful security against web attacks as well as important optimization capabilities to enhance overall performance. Having the right 'protect and perform' strategy in place is critical when your entire business exists online." – Rich Teo, CEO, itBit.

itBit’s exchange is designed to provide its members with a world-class transparent, highly available and deeply liquid marketplace for virtual currencies trading. The use of Akamai's Kona Site Defender, in conjunction with eDNS and GTM, is designed to help itBit protect the exchange from DDoS and other web attacks while at the same time optimizing performance for users around the globe. Learn more.

"We're the best in the business and we want to work with the best! Akamai HD Network sets Akamai apart from the rest. We don't have to worry about scale or about falling victim to our own success. Working with large customers, the credibility of Akamai (as an industry leader) also becomes a selling point for a startup like Livestream." - Max Haot, CEO of Livestream

LiveStream is a leading live video streaming platform and network. Serving anyone who wants a self-service platform, Livestream customers stream everything from small high school games and church sermons to globally-viewed events such as the Oscars and the Royal Wedding, which recorded 320,000 concurrent viewers and 3.2 million unique views – a record for Livestream. Delivering thousands of live events every week across a diverse audience size, scalability is a key issue for Livestream. It needs to be able to scale on demand any time of the day. Livestream has a stated mission to scale its business with events that could demand millions of concurrent users. Livestream uses the Akamai HD Network to meet such challenges successfully.

Founded in 1996, Motorcycle USA has become the leading online motorcycle magazine forging a reputation as the one-stop source for all things motorcycle related serving over 1,000,000 unique monthly visitors. The Motorcycle Superstore, the e-commerce sister site, helped generate online sales of $106 million in 2011 and recently, the company rolled out a mobile site to complement its content and commerce sites.

Motorcycle Superstore were looking for a number of solutions to address their business challenges which included meeting scale, serving a highly dynamic site, protecting against attacks and delivering and accelerating content to mobile users. After much due diligence Motorcycle Superstore chose Akamai for security, and to keep pace with rapidly growing mobile traffic while still providing the an optimal user experience, which includes a 200% in mobile channel sales. Learn more.

"Akamai DSA Premier helps ensure we're doing everything we can to speed up our load times. Moreover, it helps us realize the full value of our Magento investment." - Neal Greimel, Lead Developer for ShopJimmy

Since its founding in 2007, ShopJimmy has established itself as the global leader in TV parts and lamps distribution. The company sources and harvests TV parts from new, damaged TVs, resells what it can and recycles the rest. Recognized as one of the 50 fastest-growing private companies in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and by Inc. magazine as one of the 1,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., ShopJimmy counts "big box" retailers, TV repair shops, and do-it-yourselfers as its customers. 2012 revenues were projected to exceed $15.5 million, and the company's website lists over 38,000 SKUs. Learn more.

"Akamai demonstrated great deal of flexibility and responsiveness in working with us. This was a pleasant additional facet of working with Akamai, who we had decided on because we work with Tier 1 customers and partners. Another positive outcome of this relationship is that most of our customers – who are major media companies – also use Akamai. As a result, we have found that we have greater ease of deployment and integration with our customers." - Tom Wilde, CEO of RAMP

Ramp is a leading content optimization solutions platform for major media companies. Built on patented speech to text technology that allows the transcription and detailed metadata tagging of video, RAMP’s SaaS solutions allow advanced universal search, publishing, SEO, advertising, publishing workflow, and online video optimization. Major customers such as Meredith, ThomsonReuters, FOXNews and others use RAMP. RAMP moved to Akamai because it needed an Internet delivery platform that had proven reliability and global performance. It also needed a provider that had the ability to accelerate mobile traffic successfully.

"We were not sure Akamai would work for a small startup like ours in terms of speed, personalized service, and pricing, so Akamai set up a 2 month free trial so we could try before we buy," - Jonathan Keebler, CTO of ScribbleLive.

ScribbleLive is a live publishing platform used by major media companies who want live, real time coverage of news and other events. Major news publishers such as Thompson Reuters use ScribbleLive’s fully-hosted SaaS platform for such purpose. A significant part of ScribbleLive’s challenge is dealing with unpredictable demand. A major news event can spike the traffic exponentially and unpredictably within minutes of breaking news, as has happened with ScribbleLive time and again. ScribbleLive wanted a solutions provider that could deal with every aspect of ScribbleLive’s business both as a startup and as a live publishing platform. Since moving to Akamai, ScribbleLive’s traffic has grown significantly, and is currently seeing record traffic.

"When you think about the need to validate user locations and subscription packages, and deliver high quality video at scale in the age of TV Everywhere, Akamai offers an incredibly powerful package" - Mike Folgner, CEO, SnappyTV

Launched in 2010, SnappyTV is a live cloud social video publishing and distribution platform that empowers content owners to share clips from television via Facebook and Twitter within seconds of the live broadcast. SnappyTV aims to make it as easy as possible for content owners to maximize the full value of their programs. By sending out tweets and embedding clips in blog posts, content owners are empowered to engage their audiences on social networks and mobile devices. SnappyTV counted big name TV content providers including Fox Sports and MTV as early customers and had raised $2 million in angel funding.

"With Akamai's service in place, we can add sophistication to our offering without compromising portal performance." –Chris Pursley, VP of Software Architecture.

SOBERLINK, Inc. developed the first handheld mobile breath device, enabling secure, remote alcohol monitoring. Those in criminal justice and addiction treatment use this automated system for convenient and discreet alcohol testing. Its service is to provide results 24x7, giving the monitoring party remote access to the client's BrAC, location, and a point-in-time photo for each test. Because the test results stored on SOBERLINK's web portal are confidential electronic health records, the portal is HIPAA compliant and password protected. Moreover, when the results are delivered via the Akamai network, they are protected using industry-leading security measures, including an authentication mechanism on the Edge. As an added benefit, SOBERLINK gained asset redundancy by storing its portal content on the Akamai network. Recognizing that the perception of portal performance affects the site visitor experience, SOBERLINK appreciates the fact that the Akamai solution drastically reduced page load times by 75%. It also significantly reduced traffic to its origin servers, and the IO/CPU load on its image-processing servers. Learn more.

"The customer experience begins well before the game is played. We know that if the download is slow or unreliable, it detracts from the experience. Given the global audience and size of downloads we needed to support, we knew that we needed the very best performing solution on the market. No one else has the footprint and reach at the edge that Akamai does. On average, we exceeded 2Mbps downloads with Akamai. The cost of doing so using our own dedicated network would have been astronomical – estimated 10 times or more than using Akamai. We also considered using peer assisted delivery, but that would have resulted in a sub-optimal experience for our users. In addition to the price and performance advantage of using Akamai for our game’s downloads, we cannot say enough good things of the service and ongoing support from our Akamai team." - Greg Barwis, Vice President, Services Operations at Trion Worlds

Trion Worlds develops and publishes massively multiplayer online video games. Such games are visually rich, highly animated and real-time interactive. The games download has very large files on users PCs – in Trion World’s case, in the range of 8-9 GB per game. Trion Worlds expected huge success and worldwide download traffic of its new game RIFT and turned to Akamai at the time of this launch.

"I started working with Akamai over a decade ago. In my role, when I come into a company, they're usually looking for me to provide capability, scalability and flexibility. And I'm looking for the same from partners who help me do my job. Akamai has always been that partner." - Lon Binder, CTO, Warby Parker

For years, the eyewear business has been dominated by one or two companies who mass-produced glasses and marketed them under hundreds of different designer and brand names with wide-ranging price points based on multiple markups in a long and complex supply chain. Then in 2010, four friends founded Warby Parker, an eyewear company with a very different vision: to offer vintage-inspired frames with prescription lenses for just $95 direct to consumers online, cutting out the middleman and providing affordable access to quality eyewear at a fraction of the cost of conventional glasses. Learn more.

Akamai is Trusted By:

The top 30 media & entertainment companies

22 of the top gaming companies

900+ online commerce companies globally

More than 100 SaaS providers trust Akamai

Akamai for Startups FAQ

Learn more about Akamai for Startups as we address frequently asked questions.

Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps, and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access, and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics, and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit www.akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter. You can find our global contact information at www.akamai.com/locations.